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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#181

Post by black_puppydog »

unqueued wrote: post #118
markbnj wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years. I suspect it is the same progression as any other new technology that undergoes mainstreaming. Take automobiles for example. In the early days if you owned a car you either made yourself something of an expert (and if you were an early…

I agree that technology will be more streamlined as it becomes more widely adopted. But people still understand that they need to put gas in their car to make their car go, and if they run out of gas, their car can not go. We don't have to know what gas is, but it is still a quantity of something. But our concept of files and data is becoming so abstracted that we do not even know where our data is anymore, how much…

> we do not even know where our data is anymore, how much we need, or how long it takes to transfer it. But until we have much more bandwidth and storage, there will be problems.

I'd argue the problems will only start when there's enough bandwidth. That's when companies will be able to fully transparently store everything remotely and that's when people will really get screwed. Because if Google locks down your access for TOS "violation" then even having a needy friend will not bring back fully remote data.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#182

Post by unqueued »

nostrademons wrote: post #165
unqueued wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want that world back at all, and actually I never grew up with any of that. But, there is a very simple and direct relationship between fuel in, movement out. And most new cars can also estimate how far they can go on how much fuel. I think that this is actually the perfect relationship, and any more optimization at this point would be harmful.

I'm looking forward to self-driving electrics. You hop in the car, it takes you to your destination, and then you hop out. At off-peak hours they drive themselves to a car farm far away from the city, and recharge. The car service handles all maintenance. There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity…

> I'm looking forward to self-driving electrics. You hop in the car, it takes you to your destination, and then you hop out. At off-peak hours they drive themselves to a car farm far away from the city, and recharge. The car service handles all maintenance.

I really think that you're being overly optimistic about this. Kind of like people were about the cloud 10 years ago. There is going to be all sorts of new bullshit that you can't even imagine. I bet there will be surge blackout periods, where only rich people can travel. This will only trend worse over time, to the point where poor people are less mobile than they were when they could own cars. And you might have to subscribe to different car fleets, and will get screwed a bunch of different ways that way too.

> There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity that you might be able to make a career in, and anything invented over 30 is a threat to the natural order of things that must be resisted at all costs. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.

I try not to be a luddite. But I think you are discounting how people with more wisdom can see how things have degraded over time. Obviously those in power have a vested interest in you believing that things are only getting better. Phone manufacturers don't want to remind you of the days of headphone jacks and user swappable batteries.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#183

Post by ubercow13 »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #62
fit2rule wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use VLC on my iDevices, and I add media to it pretty easily. The fact that you expected this to work out of the box is interesting - I mean, I agree, it should work that way - but the fact that you can still very much manage your entire Media library on an iPad, user filesystem basis, shouldn't be discarded. You just didn't know you could do that with VLC maybe? (Or FileExplorer, or many of hundreds of other apps .…

From what I recall, there was some kind of problem with apps not making use of hardware video decoding. I vaguely remember trying VLC but only getting acceptable performance on Apple's own application without a jailbreak. This is circa 2013 though.

There are countless video players for iOS and most of them will use hardware decoding properly

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#184

Post by pm90 »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #153
jkp56 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful…

> pretend to promote CS in college Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bu…

I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower.

The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists.

The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect.

Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#185

Post by passwordreset »

maliker wrote: post #71
fit2rule wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work I am constantly battle the following sources of crufty bollocks: the ftp server, the windows-share fileserver, the 'one the linux guys use' (its ssh..), the jira ticket-attachments, the confluence 'pages', peoples mobile-phones, and so on. If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror, without .. oh, I get it .. I just install another 3rd-party a…

I've standardized on Google Drive, which kind of works. Not good enough version control features for code though, which is why I still need git. Been kicking around the idea of moving to git only, but the learning curve is steep (impossible?) for non-programmers.

Just a word of warning on Drive in particular. I received this notice the other day when trying to download one of my files from Drive:

--

Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time.

Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain administrator.

--

Note that this was my own file. I was the creator and I was the only downloader.

So, I guess I really didn't own it after all. That's the position that I'm going to have to recommend to anyone using any "cloud" service. If it's in the cloud, you don't own it. If you really care about it, back it up, and test your restores. Your cloud storage can disappear on a whim.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#186

Post by pieix »

tomc1985 wrote: post #120
faanghacker wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the post file world is designed for consumers, not producers. YouTube creators and software programmers are still using standard computers.

It'd be nice if desktop computing went back to the nerds. Let the masses have their mobile, and let computer software not be so dumbed-down.

It seems to me that this is the clear trend. MacOS is increasingly “mobilizing” and Microsoft has already moved to a Windows-as-a-Service [0]. The only sane desktop/workstation choice is Linux and the rift grows wider every year. As the number of use cases for a workstation OS continue to diminish and the big players stop catering to that market segment, sooner or later we’ll reach the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop!

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#187

Post by proc0 »

Non-technical people will not hesitate to adopt online services to manage their data. I have a dropbox and other services of my own, but I'm talking about the mainstream apps mentioned in the article that also have a purpose.

People completely ignore the fact you would have no access to this data if you have no online connection (or access to the account). It's not that files are going away, it's that they're being increasingly managed by tech companies, and normal people don't know any better, as evident by the article's title... it shows the author doesn't what files are for and that they are invisibly managed by a third party.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#188

Post by bsder »

cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

> it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions

I now have to teach teenagers the concept of "computer".

The idea that an app is a "recipe", a set of instructions, and something needs to execute that recipe, a "computer"--aka your phone, is now a foreign concept.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#189

Post by unqueued »

WalterBright wrote: post #167
unqueued wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow. I suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the printed word. > Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a goog…

> I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text. I used to export the text of my travel itineraries, and go through several steps to get it on my phone. Now I just take a photo of the text on my screen. It's just one step :-)

Yeah but what if you are grading papers, do you want to mark up bitmaps? People need to learn that there is more than one way to do something.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#190

Post by kzzzznot »

psaux wrote: post #81
cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

They should teach them Terminal on OSX. I would expect most CS folks would need it per building code or Git. Maybe I am too disconnected, and life is now IDE. I showed my son at a young age terminal commands to browse the filesystem. It really seems to be helping him now that he coding.

How old was your son when you started teaching him the command line, coding etc?
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